Susan Rothenberg
(1945 - ) |
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large horse paintings Art Work
| Name: |
Susan Rothenberg |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Buffalo, New York |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1945 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
large horse paintings |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
contemporary |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
Having trained at Cornell University, Ithaca, the Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University. Washington DC, Susan Rothenberg worked as an assistant to two women artists, Nancy Graves and Joan Jonas. She had studied sculpture, but began to paint with acrylic, working at the interface between figuration and abstraction. Like a number of her contemporaries, Rothenberg followed a Minimalist path (focusing on process and procedure), but dispelled its austerity by introducing imagery.
During the 1970s a horse appeared in Rothenberg's paintings, sometimes divided up with criss-crossing lines, or into segments of color. In her biography of Rothenberg (New York 1991), Joan Simon quotes the artist as saying that she chose the animal, as it seemed 'neutral', she had no emotional response to horses, but that she was also aware of its potential psychological and symbolic resonance, that it could serve as a 'surrogate' human being. She pursued this dimension in dramatic works such as The Hulk (1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) in which the animal is swamped by a treacly darkness. Despite being seen as part of the 'Neo-expressionist' school, Rothenberg avoided the grand historical themes and histrionics of other painters who shared this label.
At the end of the 1970s, Rothenberg stopped working with horse imagery, and began to formulate a wider vocabulary of personal motifs, and to work in oils. Heads and hands appeared, and human figures often caught in motion. These included one of the greatest figures in twentieth century art, Piet Mondrian. In Mondrian dancing (1984-5, Saint Louis Art Museum), Rothenberg painted him taking part in a pas-de-deux with a smiling woman, perhaps the artist herself (she feels a spiritual kinship with the Dutch painter). There is a delicious irony about the fact that Rothenberg turned a key abstract artist into an image. Since moving to a ranch in New Mexico with her second husband, the artist Bruce Nauman, in 1990, a menagerie of birds and dogs have fought their way out of the embattled surfaces of Rothenberg's paintings. |
Samples of Work
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